A Utopia Like Any Other by Dominic Hinde sampler

dominic hinde is a journalist and academic based in Edinburgh.
He has studied and worked on and in Scandinavia and Sweden
for a decade, including writing a phd on Swedish politics at the
University of Edinburgh and a period as a visiting researcher at
Sweden’s Uppsala University. In his journalistic career Hinde has
reported from Scandinavia, Germany, the us, South America and
Scotland as a freelance foreign correspondent for The Scotsman,
Washington Times, usa Today and others. He has also worked
for Danish Public Broadcasting and as a culture columnist for the
Swedish news magazine Flamman. In addition to journalism,
Hinde also translates plays and novels from the Scandinavian
languages into English and has taught on Scandinavian culture
and politics at both the University of Edinburgh and University
College London. A Utopia Like Any Other is his first full book.

A Utopia Like
Any Other
Inside the Swedish model
DOMINIC HINDE
Luath Press Limited
EDINBURGH
www.luath.co.uk

First published 2016
isbn: 978-1-910745-32-8
The paper used in this book is recyclable. It is made from
low chlorine pulps produced in a low energy, low emissions manner
from renewable forests.
Printed and bound by
Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow
Typeset in 11 point Sabon by
3btype.com
Image 1 sourced from Wikimedia by Self-taken, published under the
terms of the gnu Free Documentation License
Image 10 sourced from Wikimedia and photographed By Jordgubbe
Image 6 sourced from Wikimedia and photographed by Tage Olsin,
own work
Images 15 and 16 photographed by Gigi Chang
The author’s right to be identified as author of this work under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988 has been asserted.
© Dominic Hinde 2016

Contents
Foreword 7
Introduction 9
chapter one Everybody’s Utopia 13
chapter two
A Workers’ Utopia
How Sweden made work pay 22
chapter three Democratic Utopia
Sweden’s diverse democracy 34
chapter four A Feminist Utopia
How Sweden is halfway to equality 47
chapter five
chapter six
Svennotopia
The struggle for Swedishness 66
Ecotopia
A sustainable country in a dirty world 88
chapter seven Cultural Utopia
How Sweden became a cultural powerhouse 106
chapter eight Metropia
How Sweden built its homes for people 122
chapter nine
chapter ten
A Moderate Utopia
The new Swedish model 134
A Utopia Like Any Other
How Sweden’s future is everyone’s future 147
Recommended reading 159
5

Foreword
in the minds of anyone on the progressive side of the
political spectrum, Scandinavia is always something we talk
about in fond terms. Compared with a country like the uk
there is much about Scandinavian politics that appears attractive,
from the way it organises its democracy to its record on
equality and, in the case of Sweden, a pro-active but independent
foreign policy. It’s natural then that many in
Scotland, and especially those of us who don’t believe that
our future must forever be as part of the uk, see much to
draw from as we imagine how we might run our affairs, or
our position in the international community.
It is very easy to use Scandinavia as a political tool, and
Labour, the Scottish National Party and the Conservatives
have all at different times tried to market a supposedly
Nordic style of politics. Usually this approach takes advantage
of the fact that, though many of us have heard about the
social and economic success of the Nordic countries, few are
familiar enough to do much other than cherry pick what is
presented to us, often only cosmetically. When Scotland
regained its Parliament in 1999 there were for example positive
noises made about embracing a deliberative, multi-party
approach to how we govern. It is fair to say that while a few
of these ideas were realised, many were not. When pushed,
none of the governing parties in Scotland or the rest of the
uk have been prepared to make the shift to that more open
style of politics, and although my colleagues and I have
sought to introduce fairer, Nordic-inspired tax policies we
have generally met with resistance. It’s often repeated, and
hard to deny, that we cannot have Scandinavian levels of
investment in society with American levels of taxation, but
7

a utopia like any other
political salesmanship has achieved a deferral of the moment
when the choice must be made. It can’t put it off forever.
Throughout the 20th century the Nordic countries became
a model for other European left wing movements to follow,
but today we find ourselves in very different circumstances
to the postwar years in either the uk or across the North Sea.
Few would even try to argue that building the ethnically homogenous
society of 20th century Scandinavia was desirable, or
even possible. But a movement of normal people pushing for
social changes similar to those that forged the Scandinavian
welfare states? That seems absolutely within reach.
The challenge now, for politicians in Scandinavia and
elsewhere, is to build a more social and more democratic
society fit for the future. Perhaps at times we’re guilty of too
rosy, even utopian, a view of Scandinavia. But a politics of
social equity, environmental responsibility and democratic
accountability is both a future worth pursuing and absolutely
possible.
Patrick Harvie
8

Introduction
this is a book about Sweden, but also about the changing
world at large. It is not supposed to be a political manifesto,
but neither is it devoid of politics. The book is a combination
of foreign reporting, academic writing and extra material
collected along the way, combined to tell a story about the
Swedish model, a term familiar to a lot of people without it
ever being fully elaborated upon. The period covered by the
book was a time of political uncertainty and transition in
Sweden, with new pressures and old problems resurfacing as
part of the wider upheavals taking place across Europe. This
is why this book goes well beyond contemporary Sweden; to
suburban Scotland, urban China, and back to the makings
of modern Scandinavia and the rise of European Social
Democracy in the 1930s.
The idea of producing a book first came about on a train
trip from Gothenburg to Stockholm in the September of 2014.
It was just after the chaos of Scottish independence referendum
and the Swedish general election, a time when seemingly
everyone was an expert on the Nordic countries and
when ‘Swedish-style’ was the adjective of choice amongst
politicians in Edinburgh looking to sell the independence
project to a sometimes sceptical public. Rolling slowly through
the small towns of central Sweden, in some ways idyllic but
in others deeply troubled, there are many reminders that it is
a far more complex country than it is often portrayed as being.
This was rammed home to me in the autumn of 2015
when a translated quote from a newspaper article I had
written was lifted without attribution or context; it started
popping up all over the internet in click-bait about how
Sweden was going to become carbon neutral, the reality of
9

a utopia like any other
which was more complicated than most of the reporting on
it would admit. Similarly, around the same time another piece
did the rounds claiming that everyone in Sweden was going
to work six hour days – the real story of that particular policy
and how it happened is dealt with in the pages of this book
– but it was something most readers were perfectly happy to
believe and commented on approvingly. Shortly after, I was
sat on a panel at a uk book festival where one of the other
participants declared ‘the values of the Swedish people mean
that all their services are publicly owned’. It was both terrifyingly
essentialist (the person in question was a relatively
prominent left-wing activist) and wholly untrue. It was met
with nods of agreement from an audience happy to hear that
somewhere there was a place better than where they were.
This phenomenon, the desire to make Sweden whatever
people want it to be, is everywhere and is hard to resist. As a
freelance correspondent the two most bankable pitches for
foreign media are to find something that shows how Sweden
is miles ahead of everybody else or to report on the disintegration
of a once perfect society. Often when we talk about
Sweden abroad we are not interested in the country at all,
but in the apparent deficiencies of ourselves and where we
happen to live. On numerous occasions I have been told by
editors when pitching material from Scandinavia, ‘great, but
this doesn’t really fit with our audience’. Telling a good story
and telling the real story are not always the same thing.
In the year in which most of the things that make up this
book were written I travelled the country from top to bottom,
visiting new places and revisiting old ones. Everywhere you
go in Sweden you cannot escape the legacy of the Social
Democratic movement that built the country into what it is
today; it is pervasive even amongst those who are ideologically
opposed to left-wing politics. The people featured within
10

introduction
its pages are all real, though some have had their names
changed as they did not know they were going to be written
about when interviewed. It is in these people’s everyday lives
that the real politics exists, and where the realities and
complexities of Sweden and its much admired model can be
found.
Reading the book it will be obvious where I have taken a
lot of inspiration from, and I could not have written it without
the first class Swedish journalism of both Po Tidholm and
Niklas Orrenius as a guide, as well as the welfare work of
Irene Wennemo. On a more direct level I have benefited from
the help and inside knowledge of a raft of former colleagues
in Uppsala. I am grateful to my friend and colleague Gigi
Chang for her help in Shanghai, and to Lotte at Luath in
Edinburgh for her assistance in putting the book together.
I also owe a great amount to the late Helena Forsås Scott,
Professor of Swedish and Gender Studies at ucl in London,
who sadly passed away during its writing and who made a
lasting impression on me and many others.
There is so much about Sweden not mentioned here that
deserves coverage, and some things which are best told on
the tv or radio instead of on paper. Whatever happens to
Sweden in the future, and however it ends up being reported,
it is country that it pays to keep an eye on.
Kungliga Biblioteket, Stockholm
August 2015
11

chapter one
Everybody’s Utopia
I think we should look to countries like Denmark,
like Sweden, and Norway and learn from what they
have accomplished for their working people.
bernie sanders
it is late morning on a grey Wednesday lunchtime in the
small town of Coatbridge, just to the east of Glasgow in
suburban Scotland. On the high street it looks like any other
day of the week; a few people mill around in the entrance to
the concrete shopping centre as a man sells packs of socks from
a temporary stall under the awning of a closed shop. The only
places doing solid business are the asda supermarket and the
turf-green illuminated Celtic fc club store directly opposite.
This is not just a normal Wednesday though. Tomorrow
morning Scotland is due to go to the polls to decide whether
or not it should become an independent country, leaving
Britain for a new life as small Northern European nation.
Coatbridge is typical of the former industrial towns that ring
Scotland’s largest city, and until now the closest it has come
to Scandinavia are the replica shirts in the Celtic club store
bearing the name of Sweden striker Henrik Larsson. Kungen,
or the King as Larsson was known to his English-speaking
fans, is a legend in Glasgow’s eastern suburbs. Part of Celtic
mythology, he did Sweden’s reputation no damage during his
Scottish stay before taking his considerable talents on to
Barcelona and Manchester United.
In Larsson’s footsteps comes a Scandinavian film crew,
trying to find out what Scottish people think not only about
13

a utopia like any other
independence, but also their potential new place in a reorganised
continent alongside their Scandinavian neighbours.
The region has loomed large in the campaign, with meeting
rooms around the country filled with talk of Nordic prosperity
and new northern horizons for the North Atlantic country.
In response, members of the anti-independence campaign
appeared on television with scare stories of 80 per cent tax
rates and dystopian state controls, arguing with proindependence
voices that talked of political cooperation,
Nordic peacekeeping and a cultural revival that would make
Scotland as chic as the rest of the North Atlantic.
In a high concrete tower block overlooking Coatbridge
town centre the tv crew knock on doors looking for
interviewees. People are either not home or not interested.
Eventually though they find someone prepared to talk to
them, a former taxi-driver turned council cleaner mopping
the lino-furnished landings between floors, ten stories up in
the granite grey of the Scottish morning. The tv anchor, an
experienced half Swedish, half Danish woman used to trawling
Europe for stories, jumps in with her initial question after
some encouragement.
‘Hi there, we’re filming for a Nordic television programme
about the referendum and wondered if you wanted to talk
about how you will vote tomorrow,’ she says with a persistent
friendliness. The interviewee looks up from his mop. After
some pushing he finally agrees to be filmed, and the arrival of
two Swedish speaking crew gives him further encouragement.
‘I think I’ll vote Yes,’ he says with some consideration.
‘People are talking about it being more equal, more like
Norway and Sweden and those countries.’
The reporter nods away, indicating he should say more.
‘It would be for the kids. You’ve got a pretty good
impression of how they do things, and if Scotland could be
14

everybody’s utopia
more like that then it seems a good chance.’ Like many voters
in Scotland, he has been reached by the ubiquitous proindependence
narrative of a nation reborn as a leading light
of Northern Europe. The governing Scottish National Party
have been talking about a North Atlantic ‘arc of prosperity’
and civic groups have been eagerly importing speakers from
all over Northern Europe to talk about the country’s potential
path, packing community meetings and articulating a
different country from the one most Scots live in. The details
however are sketchy, and the motivations range from
environ mental awareness and education to gender equality
and economic success. Whatever the substance, the effect is
unambiguous – Scandinavia is there to be copied and admired.
Brand Scandinavia has a worldwide reach far beyond
Scotland’s central belt though, from members of the European
left wanting to build their own social democracies to
the Chinese middle class paying for mass produced designer
furniture at ikea stores in Beijing, or American tv executives
snapping up the rights to Nordic drama. In Scotland’s case
brand Scandinavia means reinventing the country as a better
version of itself along the lines of an imagined north. It is a
composite vision in which Scotland could have Danish wind
and Norwegian oil, Icelandic fishing and Swedish industry.
For many voters in Scotland’s independence referendum
their Scandinavian neighbours offered a glimpse of a more
radical, less granite-grey future. In the same vein, England
has been sold Swedish free schools, France has embraced le
modèle suédois in its sex work policy and Democratic presidential
hopeful Bernie Sanders has singled out Sweden and
its neighbours as a blueprint for a new America. Neither is
this love of the Nordic a new phenomenon. The Nordic
countries, and Sweden in particular, have always attracted a
special kind of attention from utopian dreamers. In 1796
15

a utopia like any other
Mary Wollstonecraft, the English feminist and political
philosopher, wrote a travel diary based on her time in Scandinavia
in which the region was used as a canvas for what a
radical and more egalitarian Britain might look like. The
book sold well and unleashed a small wave of idealistic
Nordic romanticism in the people around Wollstonecraft,
exploiting the fact that few had first-hand experience of the
places she visited
More than a century later, a then largely unknown American
journalist called Marquis Childs pitched up in Stockholm.
His stay would result in a work that came to shape many
people’s views of what internationally became known as the
Swedish Model. Sweden: The Middle Way was a bestseller in
the English-speaking world upon its publication, portraying
a harmonious society in which big business had been made
to bow to the will of the people and enlightened Social
Democratic government had led the country on a pragmatic
path between the twin perils of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and
European totalitarianism. Including audiences with senior
politicians and the working man, The Middle Way offered a
glowing appraisal of Sweden’s path from poverty to cohesive
market socialism that was the polar opposite of the depression-scarred
’30s United States Childs had left behind.
Childs’ Sweden was populated by altruistic planners and
modest politicians working for a common good in welldesigned
houses and bright factories. Touring cooperative flour
mills and interviewing the Prime Minister, his trip through a
picturebook Sweden which combined cosy tradition with clean,
modern market socialism left its mark on the British and
American public. Eighty years on the narrative is remarkably
similar, even if the world around has changed beyond all
recognition.
Despite his enthusiasm for Sweden’s political project Childs
16

everybody’s utopia
was not an economist and never set out to write about Sweden’s
burgeoning social democracy. He had originally travelled to
Stockholm to attend a housing expo but returned having
discovered what seemed to be a perfect society in the making.
In the cultural essentialism of the pre-war years he was able
to describe Swedes as a model race imbued with ‘certain
basic characteristics – patience, intelligence, perseverance,
courage’, and a democracy which ‘sprang from something
inherent in the nature of the people.’ At the same time as the
Swedish model was painted as an example for others to
follow, Swedes were granted an exceptional position in an
idealised pastoral socialism straight from the pages of a
propaganda pamphlet.
The expo that Childs set out to cover was also anything
but typical of the country it was in. Staged with considerable
effort on the part of its organisers, the Stockholm Exhibition
of 1930 was intended as an exercise in aspiration and utopian
modernism that had yet to reach out beyond Sweden’s cities.
Allan Pred, an American geographer who became one of the
most nuanced commentators of Sweden’s global image,
summarised the entire Stockholm Exhibition as nothing less
than an elaborate attempt to market Sweden abroad.
Different pavilions at the exhibition documented Swedish
achievements and Swedish Ambitions in technology and the
arts. One of the main drivers behind the entire project was
Gunnar Asplund, who was to become synonymous with the
clean and bright image of modern Sweden. In fact at the
centre of the Stockholm exhibition was an Asplund-designed
restaurant with the word Paradiset – Swedish for paradise –
emblazoned on its front. As long as the temporary exhibition
lasted it offered a glimpse of Swedish utopia made real, with
politics meeting design and culture in an alluring crystalline
vision of a forward-looking, clean, and altogether better world.
17

a utopia like any other
Three decades later, another journalist landed in Stockholm
to find out about the modern Swedish miracle that
Childs had uncovered. David Frost is better known to the
wider world as the man who would engineer an interview
with the disgraced Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal,
but in 1969 he conducted a seminal televised interrogation
of a young and intellectually sharp Swedish politician, in
search of answers about the country’s model society. The man
in the chair opposite Frost was Olof Palme, Sweden’s Social
Democratic Education Minister and Prime Minister in waiting.
As head of government he would help to cement Sweden’s
political reputation internationally through his defence of
the Swedish model from the pressures of American economic
imperialism and Soviet expansionism alike. A consummate
statesman, Palme has since become faded, a symbol of the
golden years of Sweden’s social democratic settlement. In the
minimal surroundings of a Stockholm tv studio and seated
on two leather armchairs designed by Le Corbusier, Frost
probed Palme about the Swedish way. In the days beforehand
the domestic press had promised an epic battle between
the two heavyweights, but the visiting interviewer was met
by a disarmingly cool and assured opponent. Frost’s challenging
and provocative style demanded that Palme represent
not just himself but the entire Swedish nation, from foreign
policy to social reform. Defending opposition to the Vietnam
War and being coy about his leader ship ambitions, Palme
calmly attacked the Anglo-Saxon political model and threw
Frost’s questions back at him.
‘If you could look at one place and say “David, that’s the
real Sweden,” where would you tell me to look?’ began Frost
in his trademark laid-back style.
‘I can’t,’ came the politician’s reply. ‘To a foreigner this is
might seem a small and dull country, but to me it is a country
18

everybody’s utopia
with infinite variety… there is not any one particular place
that is Sweden.’ Unhappy with the answer, Frost probed again,
‘What is the essence of being Swedish?’
‘We are often pictured as a country that has solved its
problems,’ replied Palme after some consideration. ‘There
are a great amount of unsolved problems in this country, and
to solve these problems we need a sense of community.’
Palme’s answer revealed one of the core characteristics of the
Swedish model – the nation state as political project. The
community that Palme hinted at was the People’s Home, or
folkhem, an understanding of the interdependence of people
within the country where the nation was seen as a single
family. A political undertaking synonymous with a nationality,
it had been introduced by former Prime Minister Per Albin
Hansson, a man Marquis Childs had encountered on his visit
to 1930s Stockholm. As Gunnar Asplund and his architectural
contemporaries tried to build homes for people, the Swedish
Social Democratic Party tried to build a single home for
everyone in which all could flourish.
Despite his claims to represent the working man, Palme
was as typical of the average Swede as Asplund’s pavilion
marked ‘paradise’ was of the everyday lives of most people.
Born into an aristocratic family and able to travel widely, he
was an intellectual rather than a union man with a moral
gravitas that won him plaudits around the world. Raised in
the wealthy Östermalm district of Stockholm and educated at
elite schools in Sweden and the us, his polished English tones
mirrored his similarly refined Swedish. With his abandonment
of privilege and his modest family house in Stockholm’s
western suburbs, he embodied a vision of a new classless
society. It was a vision he took with him around the world.
Where Wollstonecraft, Childs and Frost led many have
followed. The idea of a golden middle way to be copied has
19

a utopia like any other
become rhetorical currency amongst the European left and
even some Liberals and Conservatives. The British sociologist
Anthony Giddens used the concept extensively to describe a
new kind of social democratic society, and it was in turn used
by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in their own political projects
of the 1990s to promote an inclusive and cohesive vision of
a society where all could succeed and thrive.
Neither is this admiration without foundation; from the
1960s to the 1980s Sweden had the lowest levels of inequality
in the developed world by a considerable degree. When
the celebrity French economist Thomas Piketty released his
bestselling critique of global inequality, Capital in the 21st
Century, he used the country as a case study, showing how
Sweden had succeeded where others seemed to have failed. 1
Piketty compared it to France, Britain and the us as an
example of how different countries had evolved and managed
their economies, with Sweden going further than any other
developed country in reducing the huge disparities between
wealth and poverty that existed in Europe at the beginning
of the 20th century during the Belle Époque.
Together with its longstanding reputation for economic
egalitarianism, in time the Swedish model developed to
encompass gender equality and environmental responsibility
on the global stage. Sweden itself meanwhile has wholeheartedly
embraced the view that it is something special.
This fusion, or confusion, of culture and politics is produced
and reproduced worldwide across the media, from internet
listicles on modern Swedish fathers to bestselling recipe
books and conventions for fans of Swedish culture. In many
cases the country is reduced to a lifestyle choice with vague
connotations towards what the people buying it want to
believe in and what Sweden itself wants people to believe.
1 See graph on page 62.
20

everybody’s utopia
The statistics though speak for themselves. Sweden is
ranked fourth in the world for gender equality by the World
Economic Forum and has been declared the world’s most
sustainable country by one green investment monitor, also
holding a high place in the Yale University global environmental
performance rankings. It also regularly features in the
top-ten on the Human Development Index, a un-backed ranking
of countries which collates wealth, education, opportunity
and life expectancy. This creates a complex picture in which
Sweden is often presented as a vision of future society devoid
of the problems which beset the rest of the world, or by its
detractors as something far more sinister. Yet somewhere behind
these international rankings, national branding campaigns
and the utopian dreaming exists a real country occupied by
real people; safe and clean and green and modern. Where, in
the words of David Frost, is the real Sweden, and where is
the line between utopian fiction and reality? What is the
Swedish model, who are the people who live in it, and moreover,
what is it good for?
21

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